Maybe I'm a little late to the party, but in the spirit of Halloween, I overloaded myself on Evil Dead and Cabin in the Woods this weekend. I must say I'm going to miss being a college student with the chance to go to a cabin with four of my closest, stereotypical friends and get murdered one by one. My odds of that happening are about to diminish...but oh, well. I couldn't help but watch Evil Dead with a different perspective in mind. Here it is...
But What If the Evil
Dead Remake is Feminist
I’m kind of sick of all these horror film critics. Slut
this, whore that; we’ve heard it before. Like society though, horror has come a
long way.
First of all, women feel pain differently than men do. Women
are biologically capable of handling more internal pain due to the whole
birthing process and what not. It’s difficult to measure pain and how it can be
felt or compared, but seriously, birth trumps football. The men in Evil Dead barely get scratched compared
to what the women go through. They get a few nail injections, stabbing in the already
visually impaired eye, a few fingers broken off…but what the women go through
is Hell. These women mutilate themselves; that’s how tough they are. Carving
one’s own face like a jack-o-lantern and cutting one’s own arm off for survival?
This reboot, remake, re-whatever film critics call it, spins the genre around.
Secondly on the pain factor, these men are butt-hurt because
they lost touch over the years. The protagonist of the film is grappling with
watching her mentally insane mother die in an asylum – a very place dedicated
to the saving of people. Oh right, and withdrawals from heroin.
All the gore aside, these characters are completely
vulnerable to the cry of a girl. All one has to do while the evil consumes him
or her is to cry out in a sympathizing whine, making whomever feel guilty for
actions. Every time this manipulative appeal for sympathy and thereby sparing
of evil life works on the person being manipulated. Why is that? Is it because
humankind just can’t help but feel sorry for little girls? Is it that feign of
innocence that pulls at our heartstrings?
It seems like this film is rooting for the women upon close
reading. The final act where the protagonist revs up the chainsaw is like a
feminist’s way of saying “hey look what we’ve got between our legs”. It’s not a
woman imitating a male in order to defeat the evil; it’s a new form of female
empowerment. The derogatory language used all throughout isn’t putting down
females so much as riling them up for a fight. Perhaps this can all be taken as
subjugation to male dominance, but why would we ever want to look at it like
that?
